Of Home
by Bellsie805
Summary: Cuddy goes home.


Title: Of Home

Author: Bellsie

Rating: PG-13

Disclaimer: Not mine.

Character: Cuddy

Summary: Cuddy goes home.

Author's Note: It's been a long time since I've done a multi-chaptered fic, and I wanted to do another character study of Cuddy.

She's taking off her clothes again,

Says, "Let the whole world see."

She's cutting off her hair again,

Says, "This is all of me."

--_Momentary Thing, _Something Happens

Lonely, lonely, lonely, that's all she's left in the end.

She sits at home, not _her _home that she bought with the money she's made, but her parents' house. She's back for reasons she doesn't understand, but she's here, here, here, and what else can she do except curl up on the couch that she curled up on years ago when she was just a teenager lost and adrift? There's still the same hole in it that was there when she was younger and it still fits her body perfectly. Lots of things don't, though, she realizes.

The house exudes quiet and peace that Cuddy doesn't have. Her parents are in Florida or in London or St. Tropez, she's not sure, really, she has no idea, but she knows they like to travel and she knows, from their last post card, that they don't plan on being home for a long, long time. They enclosed a key and told her to take care of the place. So here she is because of some misbegotten promise she made to her parents. Hallelujah for good daughters.

The television blares at her and she hates it all and condemns it to whatever its fate might be. She can't help but watch in wonder, though, at the brats that prance across the screen, preening and peering at the camera with their pouty lips and push-up bras. Sixteen, sixteen and they already have two cars and three limos and the world underneath their fingertips. She had that once, didn't she? But she lost it, lost it, lost it, made herself lose it.

Sixteen and the world lay before her and everything was new and she was just beginning…She had her best dreams on this couch. She turns to face the pillow. The large, looming windows taunt her with their darkness—the nighttime sky, oh, the nighttime sky.

She should be at the hospital, and she very well knows this, but she deserves breaks, just like any other normal human being. She can't run a hospital like she is right now. She's a disaster, a walking, ticking, time bomb destined to blow at her command. She's always been one for beautiful, cacophonous self-destruction. She did it at sixteen and she won't feel bad about doing it at thirty-eight.

She rolls back over and stares into the recessed lights in the ceiling. The lights press themselves into her eyes and they dare her to blink. She does, she does and she rubs her eyes with her hands and she can hear the "peepers" chirping in the background. They seem to say, "You're back! You're back!"

She had arrived earlier today and dropped her bags on the floor as soon as she walked in. She sprinted upstairs and flung herself onto her bed where she had cried and cried for several hours. Only now had she worked herself up to come downstairs and to lie on the couch. She couldn't take the brats on the television anymore.

So, off the couch she gets, and to the DVD player she glides. She picks out "One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest" and slips it in to watch. She feels so young, always so young in this house and she's not sure, not sure, why.

"I'm lonely, goddamnit!" She shouts to the walls and they respond with an amiable shrug.

"Lonely. Thirty-eight and I'm not married and I thought I had the world and I was happy. And I thought I was happy. Do you know what it's like? Do you know what it's like to realize that your life is a lie?" She yells. Crying commences.

She discovered her unhappiness when she found an old diary of hers. Freshman year of high school and the last time she had been an idealist. When Cuddy read it, and reflected on her day, she knew, knew, knew that she had become the person her younger self would have hated. She had become the person that her younger self feared. Cuddy-the-teenager worried that her sharp sarcasm would turn her into a bitter old maid. And here she was. The self-fulfilling prophecy.

As a teenager, she watched her teachers and her mother and the women around her and most of them were miserable and she could never figure out why. The men seemed happy enough—content with their football and their food and their sex. But the women, they carried baggage that seemed universal, but that Cuddy could never discern. Her mother with her sad eyes and her housewife's practiced smile. Her math teacher with her snarling voice and cutting wit. The woman in the grocery store's perpetual frown. They were all hiding something.

She still doesn't know what it is, but perhaps it's the sin of being female in a man's world—every place she's ever gone still holds the taint of the Good Old Boy's Club in the air and she can't help but sniff it and think, _Was that what those women smelled_?

Her tears echo throughout the house; it's always been too big. She lets the television play on in the background and rushes upstairs. She wonders if any of her old friends live around here and if they're still like they used to be, because she's not and she needs some reassurance that she's not the only one who's disappointed in how they turned out. She needs that before she goes back to Princeton to be harassed by House and boards and politics.

Halfway up the stairs, she has this wild idea to pick up her racquet and go play tennis in the dark and by herself. She can serve for ages. It helps her tone her arms and the rhythmic slapping of the ball calms her nerves. She should go. She will go. Not now, though, practicality warns her, so she continues her sojourn upstairs.

Her room, as she noted when she first came in, has hardly changed since they moved in the house, years and years ago. Still pink curtains (faded by time now) and white- and pink-rose bedspread. Stuffed animals are the same and books still litter the floor. She throws herself down on the bed and closes her eyes.

Sleep, so very elusive for the practicing insomniac, comes quickly.


End file.
